October 14, 2008

Has Anybody Else Read...?

There are lots of books out there. Some of them you love so much that you want to live inside them and never come out. Some of them are good for reading on airplanes and then leaving behind for someone else to kill a few hours with. Some of them are so not worth your time that you put them down and read the back of a Lucky Charms box instead. And there are a few that are so meh that you actually FORGET YOU'RE READING THEM. Months later, you find them under the bed or in the back of your car and have no memory of them. You only know you started reading them at some point in your life because there are cookie crumbs inside them, and you're pretty sure they didn't come from the bookstore that way.

But those books you love and want to live inside? Those are the ones you want everybody to read because they're sososososo good, and you know your friends will just love them, and you really want to know if they felt sorry for Cordelia Aubrey or just hated her, or whether they were surprised when the ghosts of the Brontes showed up, or whether they'd rather spend an afternoon with Merricat Blackwood or Antonia Rutherford Bird. But you never get to have those discussions, because YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS EVER HEARD OF THIS BOOK and your friends look at you as if you're crazy when you insist that they drop everything and read it right now.

There are lots of books I've read of which I'm convinced that I must have found the only copy ever printed. No one I know has ever read, for instance, "The Becker Scandal", an autobiographical novel by Vina Delmar that tells the story of a family affected by their tangential relationship to what was, at the time, a scandalous murder case. And I can't get anybody to read "Don't Knock the Corners Off", by 15-year-old Caroline Glyn. It's a brilliant story about how a child manages to stay her own eccentric self in a repressive public school system that's designed to make everyone turn out the same. And then there's "Born in Wedlock", a really delightful book about a little girl at the turn of the 19th century whose theatrical background and Gaiety Girl mother make it hard for her to fit into life in a very, very conservative small town... and whose voice is one of the most enjoyable I've ever come across. All three books are terrific, all feature young female protagonists who are worth getting to know, and all three deserve to be read today just as much as they did when they were published twenty or thirty or forty years ago.

These are just three of many seemingly forgotten books are too good to fade into obscurity, so I'm going to try to drag some of them out into the blogosphere. Hopefully I'll run across some readers to whom these books are as familiar as they are to me -- and hopefully some readers will discover them, and point me towards their "obscure" finds.

Next post: THE BECKER SCANDAL. Turn of the century New York. Vaudeville, ice cream sodas, outdoor cinemas, hit men named Lefty Louie and Gyp the Blood, crooked cops, a murder that knocks everything else off the front pages for months... and a family whose lives are turned upside down by their unexpected connection to a notorious murder victim.

Comments

Has Anybody Else Read...?

There are lots of books out there. Some of them you love so much that you want to live inside them and never come out. Some of them are good for reading on airplanes and then leaving behind for someone else to kill a few hours with. Some of them are so not worth your time that you put them down and read the back of a Lucky Charms box instead. And there are a few that are so meh that you actually FORGET YOU'RE READING THEM. Months later, you find them under the bed or in the back of your car and have no memory of them. You only know you started reading them at some point in your life because there are cookie crumbs inside them, and you're pretty sure they didn't come from the bookstore that way.

But those books you love and want to live inside? Those are the ones you want everybody to read because they're sososososo good, and you know your friends will just love them, and you really want to know if they felt sorry for Cordelia Aubrey or just hated her, or whether they were surprised when the ghosts of the Brontes showed up, or whether they'd rather spend an afternoon with Merricat Blackwood or Antonia Rutherford Bird. But you never get to have those discussions, because YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS EVER HEARD OF THIS BOOK and your friends look at you as if you're crazy when you insist that they drop everything and read it right now.

There are lots of books I've read of which I'm convinced that I must have found the only copy ever printed. No one I know has ever read, for instance, "The Becker Scandal", an autobiographical novel by Vina Delmar that tells the story of a family affected by their tangential relationship to what was, at the time, a scandalous murder case. And I can't get anybody to read "Don't Knock the Corners Off", by 15-year-old Caroline Glyn. It's a brilliant story about how a child manages to stay her own eccentric self in a repressive public school system that's designed to make everyone turn out the same. And then there's "Born in Wedlock", a really delightful book about a little girl at the turn of the 19th century whose theatrical background and Gaiety Girl mother make it hard for her to fit into life in a very, very conservative small town... and whose voice is one of the most enjoyable I've ever come across. All three books are terrific, all feature young female protagonists who are worth getting to know, and all three deserve to be read today just as much as they did when they were published twenty or thirty or forty years ago.

These are just three of many seemingly forgotten books are too good to fade into obscurity, so I'm going to try to drag some of them out into the blogosphere. Hopefully I'll run across some readers to whom these books are as familiar as they are to me -- and hopefully some readers will discover them, and point me towards their "obscure" finds.

Next post: THE BECKER SCANDAL. Turn of the century New York. Vaudeville, ice cream sodas, outdoor cinemas, hit men named Lefty Louie and Gyp the Blood, crooked cops, a murder that knocks everything else off the front pages for months... and a family whose lives are turned upside down by their unexpected connection to a notorious murder victim.